Compumetrically speaking, chapter 2

George C. Smith, Ph.D., Editor-at-large
Thursday, 10 January 2002 TODAY'S CHAPTER HAS to do with another application of that rigorous adjunct science to computer security now known as the study of compumetrical action — compumetrical actions being those bad things we know result automatically — the detonation of fuel refineries, the plug holes opening in the bottom of ships on the high seas, the mysterious opening of all the electric garage doors on your block, etc. — when someone presses keys on a PC halfway around the world.

Yonah Alexander babbled how "under an Iraqi attack on the nation's critical infrastructure, telephone systems would crash, freight and passenger trains would collide, oil refineries would explode, the air traffic control system would be undermined and cities would suffer from blackouts..."

Our designated expert on compumetricality this week is Yonah Alexander, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. Reported on GovExec.com just prior to Christmas, Alexander opined: "Many people feel terrorists are not going to utilize the cyber weapon ... terrorists will use whatever tools they can in order to achieve their goals. Cyber more than any other weapon is the great equalizer. At the press of a button [terrorists] can actually destroy systems." Disappointingly, though, the Chinee are no longer the cyber-menace of geo-political convenience. Prior to September 11, all inside-the-Beltway mouths tended to chant in unison on the clear and present perfidy of Chinee cyber-terrorists and information warriors, warning all how the legions of Fu Man-Tsu were readying compumetric strikes with Internet shock troops.

From a recent Computerworld, a bit of grasping: "[An obscure] Canadian threat analysis of al-Qaeda's cybercapabilities concludes that although there have been no examples to date of cyberterrorist attacks conducted by al-Qaeda, 'Bin Laden's vast financial resources, however, would enable him [to amass] and mount such an attack in very short order.'"

The statement is followed by the inevitably familiar doom quote: "the Web sites will be safe but the lights will be out, and water and oil won't flow..."

Whosoever is our enemy can always compumetrically turneth off the lights. Only the pure milk of human kindness spares us.

However, with the great disillusionment of September 11, the merciless accusation of the Chinee of cyber-deviltry has lost a great deal of its former cachet. And the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as far as computer demonology go, appear ludicrous even to many hawks. (Perhaps not all, though. See sidebar.) So, there is a political need for a new cyber-enemy ... and "Iraq has quietly been developing a cyber arsenal called Iraq Net since the mid-1990s," Alexander said precociously. One can tell this is phlogiston by name alone: Iraq Net. It is something one can too easily imagine being delivered at a Richard Clarke-ian security briefing. Vmyths reckons that if there were indeed such a formal thing in an Islamic nation, it would have a little more grandiloquence and zing to its moniker, like The Mighty Electronic Sword of Vengeance and Punishment in the Name of Allah or The Iraq-Islamic Committee for the Promotion of Computing Machine-Enabled Call and Combat. Speaking compumetrically, Alexander was reported to have revealed astoundingly that "under an Iraqi attack on the nation's critical infrastructure, telephone systems would crash, freight and passenger trains would collide, oil refineries would explode, the air traffic control system would be undermined and cities would suffer from blackouts." Vmyths, speaking contra-compumetrically, notes that Iraq couldn't even support its ".iq" TLD (top-level domain service) in the mid-1990s. Assertions of the construction of a mighty computer Destructor capable of remotely broiling U.S. real estate seem ~~idiotic~~counter-intuitive ... but are more exhilarating reading.